My invention affords a superior degree of safety and convenience in removing heated food from a microwave oven by reinstating the turntable's start-position as a park-position concurrent with a completion of a microwave heating cycle used to heat or cook food and similar items.
As is well known and taught by Kang in U.S. Pat. No. 5,558,799 the turntable in many microwave ovens may stop in a random position and this can result in problems when taking food out of the microwave oven. ('799 Kang, col. 1, lines 52-58). However, what Kang offers is to start the microwave cooking and the turntable rotation at the same time. The cooking proceeds for a period of time and stops. The turntable may be in a random position at this instant, but it is programmed to continue rotation until it returns to about the same position that it was in when the food was placed into the microwave oven. As a result, considerable variation in time may occur between completion of cooking and the moment when the door may be opened to retrieve the food. In a typical microwave oven having a 3-rpm rate, the circumvolutional time period is 20-seconds. Therefore, if a food item is placed in the oven for a 30-second warm-up, the '799 teaching stops-cooking about 10 seconds into the second turntable rotation and the turntable will continue to rotate for 20 additional seconds before the food is removable.
In another U.S. Pat. No. 5,440,105 Kim teaches a similar microwave oven operation in which the heating and the turntable rotation begin together ('105 Col. 3, Lines 36-39), the cooking cycle completes ('105 Col. 4, Line 5) and “the turntable continues to be rotated” ('105 Col. 4, Lines 17-18); also said in claim 1 para. F (and G). In other words, although cooking has finished, the food remains in the microwave for a considerable length of time before it may be conveniently removed.